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JLC Director to present at LDA of Oklahoma conference

Clarksville, Ark. --- Jones Learning Center Director Julia Frost will participate in a panel discussion and give a presentation at the Learning Disabilities Association of Oklahoma's 2011 state conference on November 17 and 18 in Tulsa, Okla.

Julia Frost, Director of the university's Jones Learning Center, will present a talk at the LDAO conference in Tulsa.

The theme of the panel is "Achieving Success for Students with Learning Disabilities and/or Attention Deficit Disorder."

"I am doing a short presentation and answering questions on 'Coaching for Academic Success,'" Frost said. "It has to do with how our staff have all been trained as ADD coaches, and how the whole point is to help the students experience academic success while helping them learn to take responsibility for that success and become more independent. That can be really challenging, but this presentation talks about specific ways that can we help students take more responsibility; it discusses how to help them take ownership of their work, rather than relying on the tutor or the coach. I always tell my students we're teaching them not to need us anymore!"

Frost, who has been director of Jones Learning Center since 1994, says the biggest challenge for many of her students in JLC is that college is far less structured than high school. "If they're not in a program like ours," she says, "they have to really develop their own structure. In high school, you're in class a huge block of the day and are expected to study for just a portion of that; but in college you're in class just a portion of the day, but expected to study a huge amount in your time outside class. And that can be really difficult for some students, especially at first. So we start out by helping them a great deal, but gradually getting them to the point where they can establish their own structure and stick with it."

She says prioritizing is also a common problem. "In the chaos of everything they have to do for classes, they have a hard time figuring out what to do first, so our staff help them to slow down, look at what work needs attention now, and how to break down big, end-of-the-semester projects into short-term goals. So this presentation has to do with those issues, some goal setting, some having the students look honestly at what their strengths are, their weaknesses, and the challenges they have to be concerned about."

Other sessions will include Tools for Person Centered Thinking and Person Centered Planning: The Communication Chart, by Jennifer Randle; The ABC's of Learning Disabilities and ADD, by Joy Modenbach; and Parent Perceptions of Parent Involvement of Students with Learning Disabilities, by Holly Rice.

The keynote speaker for this year's conference will be Dr. Lisa Dieker, Professor and Lockheed Martin Eminent Scholar at the University of Central Florida.

Educators, parents, and students with learning disabilities or ADD who are interested in the Jones Learning Center are encouraged to attend the conference. For more information, go to http://www.ozarks.edu/jlc, or call (479) 979-1403.

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University of the Ozarks is a private four-year, comprehensive university located in Clarksville, Arkansas.